Data Movement in the Node.js API

Node.js provides concurrency through multiple waits for IO responses, instead of multiple threads. This strategy avoids the challenges and risks of multi-threaded programming for middle-tier clients that are IO rather than compute intensive.

In the Node.js API, that general architectural principle of Node.js means that better throughput for large data sets requires multiple concurrent requests to each e-node (instead of serial requests to one e-node).

In other words, while the Node.js client is submitting a request or processing a response, many other pending requests are waiting for the server to respond. Because the round trip over the network is typically much more expensive (especially in the cloud), the client can typically submit many requests, and / or process many responses, during the time required for a single round trip to the server.